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In Christ, All Things Hold Together

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In Christ, All Things Hold Together Introduction In his landmark book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), evangelical historian Mark Noll encouraged Christians to pursue Christian scholarship on the basis of their theological convictions, particularly the biblical affirmation of the goodness of creation. If God created the world, and declared it “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and if God has given us the task of ruling that creation as his image-bearers, then it is our gift and responsibility to explore and understand creation in order to realize its potential under God. Such scholarship and exploration would include the good work of scientific research and technological innovation. Thus Noll motivated and grounded a call for Christian pursuit of science (and Christian scholarship more broadly) in a theology of creation. In reply, some critics noted that appeals to a theology of creation often seem to be unhooked from Christ and the cross. In other words, a theological affirmation of science rooted in creation is not robustly “Christian,” but merely “theistic,” and too easily slides towards a functional deism. Noll seems to have heard those concerns and thus in his follow-up book, Jesus “…in Christ, Christ and the Life of the Mind (from all things hold which this pamphlet is excerpted), together.” he ramps up the theological rationale to a properly Christological argument. In other words, if the earlier affirmation of science was rooted in the conviction that God’s creation is “very good,” his more recent argument is rooted in the conviction that “in Christ, all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). 1 In the course of that argument, Noll does two very important things. First, he provides a nuanced historical account of how we got to where we are by concisely pointing out that the terms of contemporary debates—between Christians and New Atheists, or between young earth creationists and evolutionary creationists—are the products of shifts in western thinking that radically changed how Christians talked about “nature” and God’s relationship to creation (what philosophers call “metaphysics”). So while these folks might be diametrically opposed to one another, they have all (unwittingly) accepted a metaphysical paradigm that needs to be reconsidered. This leads to Noll’s second and most important point: historic Christian faith and the “thick” treasures of orthodox Christian theology offer us powerful resources for reimagining just how to work through difficult questions at the intersection of Christian faith and science. Indeed, Noll suggests that the ancient theological resources of the Council of Chalcedon have something to offer to our postmodern grappling with scientific challenges. The way forward is to So rather than seeing remember what’s been “the tradition” as a handed down to us. liability that needs to be “updated,” Noll celebrates Christological orthodoxy and historic Christian reflection as a gift to be celebrated and mined in our contemporary context. The way forward is to remember what’s been handed down to us. 2 “Come and See” by Mark A. Noll1 We believe in one God the Father all-powerful, Maker of heaven and of earth, and of all things both seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ . , through whom all things came to be . [W]e all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the Virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ . Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451 The bearing of Christology The bearing of on science involves historical as Christology on well as theological awareness. Historical awareness is required science involves because the relationship between historical as well God’s “two books,” Scripture as theological and nature, has changed awareness. significantly over the course of centuries between biblical times and the present. So long as Christian communities thought it was a straightforward task 3 to harmonize what Scripture seemed to communicate about the natural world and what observing nature or reflecting on nature seemed to communicate, the discussion was contained. This situation, with some exceptions, largely prevailed until the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the modern scientific era. Yet even in the centuries when challenges to a “literal” reading of Scripture were fewer than later, perceptive believers knew that considerable sophistication was necessary to bring together biblical interpretation and interpretations of nature. Thus, early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine noted that perceptive non-Christians really did know a great deal about “the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth.” Given the fact of such able observers, he held it was “a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics.” When this kind of nonsense proliferated, the great danger was that those outside the faith would believe that the Scriptures themselves (“our sacred writers”) taught the nonsense and so would be put off from the life-giving message of the Bible. As Augustine expressed this danger, “If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?” His closing injunction was to chastise “reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture” who “defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements” by calling on “Holy 4 Scripture for proof and even recit[ing] from memory many passages which they think support their position.”2 Yet comparatively speaking, in Augustine’s own lifetime and for long thereafter, there were relatively few occasions when efforts at uniting scriptural teaching with knowledge gained from study of nature posed great difficulties. That situation changed when the results of modern science called into question a growing array of straightforward or “literal” interpretations of the Bible. From the sixteenth century onward, the number of apparent problems accumulated. Hard-won conclusions in the natural sciences, which were gained through ever more intense and ever more sophisticated study of nature, seemed to contradict what the Scriptures taught. Thus, the earth was the center of neither the solar system nor the entire universe (as might be concluded from some biblical passages); the earth was billions of years old (not of recent vintage); the universe was unimaginably vast (not sized by human scale); animal “species” designated temporary way stations on continuously changing paths of evolutionary development (not permanently fixed entities); human beings were part of this evolutionary development (not a species distinct in every way from animals). As these seeming contradictions became urgent in the development of modern science, believers wrestled long and hard to keep what was learned from nature and what was learned from Scripture in sync. While the difficulties for each particular question involving Scripture and nature were important, it is even more important to remember that they mattered only because of the larger framework spelled out by St. Augustine. Since Scripture described the new life offered in Christ, which was the most important thing for all humans in all of history, to cast substantial doubt on Scripture for secondary concerns was to shake confidence in what the 5 Bible revealed concerning the most important matter. Yet once that relationship between Scripture on all things (including nature) and Scripture on ...if Christ is the central the most important thing and unifying theme of (reconciliation with God Scripture, then Christ in Christ) is kept in view, progress may be possible should be preeminent on issues involving in understanding Scripture and science. The scriptural revelation key is that if Christ is the about everything else, central and unifying theme including nature. of Scripture, then Christ should be preeminent in understanding scriptural revelation about everything else, including nature. In order to view scientific exploration as a christological concern, it is helpful first to explore historical reasons for the difficulties besetting efforts at bringing scientific
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